


a small death, a second coming

by minarchy



Category: Uncharted
Genre: Bathing/Washing, Frottage, M/M, Minor Injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-17
Updated: 2012-11-17
Packaged: 2017-11-18 20:34:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/565009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minarchy/pseuds/minarchy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nate is twenty, and Sully is forty-five, and it has been raining for seventeen days. Rain or not, they had a job to complete, a pay check to collect, even with Nate sliding fifty-eight yards down a mountainside when the ground, thick and heavy with moisture, collapsed out from under him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a small death, a second coming

**Author's Note:**

> for the 'bathing/washing one's partner' square of my kinkbingo card.

       
_"Why," said I, glancing up at my companion, "that was surely the_  
_bell? Who could come tonight? Some friend of yours, perhaps?"_  
_"Except yourself I have none," he answered._  

     **— _Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Five Orange Pips_**  

  
  


Nate is twenty, and Sully is forty-five, and it has been raining for seventeen days. Rain or not, they had a job to complete, a pay check to collect, even with Nate sliding fifty-eight yards down a mountainside when the ground, thick and heavy with moisture, collapsed out from under him.

But now the job is done, and now Sully can deal with the damage, half carrying Nate back to their shitty motel room and turning all the taps on full, filling the stained bathtub with water and the bathroom with steam. Nate is shivering still, trying to suppress it as if pretending he is not will make the response go away; or perhaps he thinks that Sully will think less of him, as if a healthy reaction is something to be ashamed of, a sign of weakness. Whatever his reasoning, Sully ignores it in favour of coaxing Nate’s arms into the air so he can peel his shirt off his chest. Nate winces repeatedly as the fabric lifts away from his skin, tacky and unwilling in places; Sully can see the dark bruising and grazing and breaking of the skin, still oozing blood as the cotton tugs the scabbing free.

He has to have Nate duck his head so he can pull the shirt fully over it; Sully remembers when Nate first needed his help like this, how Sully was easily two full heads taller than him and had to kneel to towel him roughly, forcing the blood circulation back around his greying skin. Now, Nate is as tall as he is and filling out the limbs he shot into, all wiry muscles and shoulders almost too broad for him and downy body hair. Sully lets him lean into his shoulder as he manoeuvres him to sit on the edge of the bath, Nate keeping a hand on his shoulder as Sully undoes his boots. Even his socks are black-brown and heavy with mud; it has washed up his calves like a tideline and soaked through his jeans, covering him entirely in a gritty, silt-like layer.

Once he has Nate fully naked, he pushes him back gently, allowing Nate to move his own limbs enough that he sinks into the hot water with a sound halfway between a moan and a whimper as it lifts the grit away and stings against his broken skin.

“Easy, kid,” Sully says. “Just got to get you clean and warm, and then you can sleep.”

“Yeah, I know,” Nate says, his voice low and tight, like his body can’t decide between pain and exhaustion. “Not my first rodeo, old man.”

Sully huffs a laugh as Nate settles himself, feet against the floor of the tub; his legs are long enough now that he basically fills the small space, his knees bent out of the water. Nate leans forwards, curving his spine and wrapping his arms around his thighs to hold himself there as Sully carefully but thoroughly cleans him off, using the showerhead to rinse the soap off his back.

Although he does his best to be gentle, Sully has to balance speed and efficiency with Nate’s personal comfort; he has no idea what kind of crap was in the soil Nate soaked himself in, and he needs to get it out before infection sets in. He moves Nate’s limbs so he was wipe the washcloth over his skin, dragging blood and grit and dirty water down and off him. It doesn’t take long until the bath water is the colour of a reed swamp, dark and thick and blackish-brown; he pulls the plug and lets it drain, using the shower to sluice Nate and the tub down as best as he can; the flow is weak, but at least it’s warm. Colour is seeping back into Nate’s skin.

Without the water level, it is easier to see where the grit still clings to the creases, lodged under Nate’s cuticles and in his hair; Sully sets the showerhead back in its bracket helps Nate to rub these last, sensitive areas clean as best they can. He has a bottle of disinfectant, of course — there is a lot to be said for alcohol as a permanent fixture in a first aid kit, but there is something cleaner about the sharp stench of disinfectant as opposed to the sickly sweet taste of whiskey in the air. Disinfectant is cheaper, too.

He rinses the washcloth in the sink; the water comes off it dark and red, in patches. Once it runs clean, he squeezes it touch-dry and dilutes the disinfectant.

“This is going to sting,” he says, angling Nate to lean back so he can get a better look at his chest.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Nate says, but he still hisses and flinches automatically when the cloth touches his skin.

The cuts are looking cleaner, now, blazing scarlet against Nate’s winter-pale skin; his bruises are heavy purple, but they’ve stopped spreading. Sully is satisfied that there is nothing internally wrong; no broken bones, no punctured organs. 

“Come on, kid,” he says, tilting Nate’s head back underneath the water flow.

He rinses Nate’s hair through carefully; there’s some grazing around and into his hairline where he’s clearly caught his head on a rock going down. The shampoo stings when Sully lathers it up, but Nate barely flinches now, as Sully works it into his scalp. He relaxes into Sully’s hands, his head dropping forwards as Sully’s fingers move down to his nape, pushing back against Sully’s hands like a cat.

For all that he’s twenty years old, Sully can see little difference between the Nate now and the Nate at fifteen, having misjudged his jump from a rooftop and fallen thirty feet into a pile of empty wooden crates. He had been just as pliant then, just as willing to trust Sully’s hands to clean him up and make him safe. It was an instinct that never ceases to amaze; when he had been fifteen, Sully had trusted no one with his body, naked or otherwise, but himself.

Rinsing Nate’s hair clean, Sully takes his time making sure that none of the soap gets in his eyes, rubbing the rough pad of his thumb over his hairline at his temples on the pretext of massaging the suds free. It is rare enough that he gets to see Nate like this, quiet and peaceable, turning and curling instinctively into Sully’s hands. To himself, in these silent moments, Sully can admit how much he likes it.

Between the two of them, they get Nate upright and pat him dry, the towel pile coming away with fresh, pink stains; but not the first they’ve seen, Sully hazards, and not the last, either. Nate rests his hand on the back of Sully’s neck, his fingers toying with the short hair at his nape, when Sully takes the towel from him to dry his back and calves. He lingers whilst Sully tidies the tiny bathroom, hanging the towels and recapping the disinfectant (he’ll pour the bottle over the bathtub and the sink before they leave in the morning), and then pads naked across the thin carpet to his bed.

Sully checks to make sure he’s in, properly, and that he hasn’t reopened anything in the short walk across the room; and then he makes to step across to his own bed, all of half a yard away, but

“Don’t be an ass,” Nate says, holding Sully in place with sleep-slack fingers around his wrist. “I’m tired, and you’re warm.” He tugs, limply but with insistence, at Sully’s arm. “Give the cleaning ladies something to gossip about.”

Sully laughs, a rumble deep in his chest, and shakes his head. Nate takes this for the acquiescent it is, and loosens his grip on Sully’s arm so that his fingers drag down his palm as it drops, so that Sully can shuck his own boots and pants. He has never been able to refuse Nate anything.

“No funny business, now,” he says, sliding in next to Nate.

“Promises, promises,” Nate says, his voice already slipping off into sleep.

  
  
Sully wakes up with his dick steadily making its way towards fully hard. Nate is pressed up against his side, pressing his erection into Sully’s hip, his head tucked into the crook of Sully’s neck; his breath is hot and damp on Sully’s skin, and he has the fingers of one hand teasing Sully’s nipple through his vest, rubbing lightly in circles around the areola and occasionally brushing against the hard peak. 

“Kid,” Sully says, his voice sleep- and arousal-rough. 

“Mm,” Nate says in response, his hips moving against Sully’s thigh in slow, languid little rolls. He’s naked, and hard, and apparently in no rush; Sully’s hips shift involuntarily as the tip of Nate’s tongue touches his neck. “Morning, sunshine.”

Sully groans as Nate’s thigh nudges his erection as Nate tightens his leg around Sully’s, pushing his dick harder into Sully’s hip and dragging his thumb over Sully’s nipple; he presses an open-mouthed kiss to Sully’s neck, the broad flat of his tongue swiping roughly over his skin.

“What happened to no funny business?” Sully says. He is fully hard in his briefs now; he can feel Nate’s breathing hitch every time his foreskin catches on the fabric, and it’s fucking intoxicating.

Nate laughs against his skin, the sound coming out more than half a moan as he moves. “That was last night,” he says, “and now it’s morning. Weren’t you listening?”

Unable to prevent himself from rolling his eyes, Sully shifts and rolls so he’s on top of Nate, his forearms bracketing his head. He can look down at see where Nate’s erection lies against his stomach, where the sticky, shiny trail of precome tacks from his cockhead to Sully’s hip, how the fabric of Sully’s briefs are damp with it. As he watches, a shiny droplet of precome oozes from the tip, and his mouth goes very dry. Nate’s watching him, when he looks back up, pupils blown wide and lips parted, curling in that goddamn smirk; he’s getting off on Sully’s reaction to him, and Sully has to kiss the smirk from his mouth. He presses in tongue in, and Nate opens up for it, teases it with his own before sucking on it. His hands push the fabric of Sully’s vest up out of the way so he can get his hands on skin.

“Too many clothes,” he says, breaking the kiss to tug insistently at Sully’s vest, and then dragging him back down to kiss him again. Sully laughs into his mouth.

“Seems to me it’s working for you just fine,” he says, and Nate scowls around his moan as Sully rocks his hips down.

“Asshole,” Nate says, and shoves his hands down Sully’s briefs to grab his arse, pull him closer to Nate can grind himself against him. “Come on, come on.”

Neither of them move away so that Sully can remove his briefs properly, but they get shoved down his thighs and steadily move their way further down as they move together. Nate pushes Sully’s vest up his chest and darts in to lick and nip at a nipple before grabbing the back of it to tug it off Sully properly; he drops it somewhere, unceremoniously, and arches up into Sully’s bare skin in one long, sinuous writhe.

“God damn it, kid,” Sully says, dropping his forearms on either side of Nate’s torso and folding his hands around his shoulders. Nate doesn’t even answer; his breath is coming in little panting moans, like he can’t stop the sounds as he rolls his erection into the crease of Sully’s hip. His head is angled back against the mattress and he takes the opportunity to latch his teeth into the clean line of Sully’s jaw. Sully drops his head and snarls, pants, his nose pressed into the soft skin where Nate’s hairline meets his ear. He gets a hand down between them, shifting the spare to grip the back of Nate’s neck, mindful of the bruising Nate sustained the day before; when he wraps a hand around both of them, Nate’s teeth dig into his jaw.

“God damn it, kid,” Sully says, again, as he fucks into his fist, Nate moving in mirror so their cocks slide over each other between Sully’s fingers, slick with precome. It’s hot, and tight, and the head and foreskin keep catching on the callouses of Sully’s hands, and Nate doesn’t shut up. He’s making these small grunts, panting “uh, uh, uh,” with every thrust, having released Sully’s jaw in favour of dropping his head against the mattress and breathing, watching their cocks move together.

“God, Sully,” he says, and scrabbles to grab the back of Sully’s neck, to pull him down for a kiss; more hot breath and teeth and tongue than anything else, gasping and biting at each other’s mouths as they chase down their orgasms.

  
  
“Give the cleaning ladies something to gossip about, huh?” Sully says, grinning down at Nate.

“Hell,” Nate says, tangling his fingers in the chain of Sully’s dog tags, now damp with sweat, “you’re ex-military. They’re probably expecting it.”

“And you’ve always been one to live up to people’s expectations,” Sully says.

“Naturally,” Nate says, and grins.


End file.
